Feb 29, 2012

The Big Egg Hunt presented by Fabergé will see over 200 beautifully painted and decorate egg sculptures placed all over central London from 21st February until the Easter weekend. All the two and a half foot eggs will be hidden around 12 Egg Zones, encouraging all of London to participate in what is set to break the Guinness World Record for the most people participating in an Egg Hunt! The Big Egg Hunt hopes to raise over £2million for the charities Elephant Family and Action for Children, as hunters text message the unique keyword for every egg they find, entering the competition for the chance to win The Fabergé Diamond Jubilee Egg. Hunters can also collect their eggs to Facebook by checking in to each egg they find. All the eggs are for sale and will be auctioned at a live event by Sotheby’s and a grand online auction.

Feb 23, 2012

Classification: Creativity: 3,9; Will to buy: 3,7; Empathy for the Brand: 3,9

Total: 3,8

Watch and enjoy all the stunts at http://popuptheater.intel.comThe Ultrabook™ POP-UP THEATER is a series of live stunts that demonstrates the ultra thin design & responsiveness of the Ultrabook™.A uniquely choreographed team of 60 individuals create a human digital wall made of Ultrabooks. The Pop-Up teams make surprise appearances on the streets of Los Angeles, transforming an everyday location into a mini theater.

Feb 22, 2012

Email marketers have long been urged to enhance their formats with links social and mobile platforms to make them as useful to advertisers as possible. This lesson seems to have been absorbed by providers of another popular digital ad format: mobile coupons.

In recent days, a number vendors and retailers have introduced new features, or announced plans for new products, to make the mobile coupon more flexible, shareable and user friendly.

Sharing Via Facebook

Modiv Media has introduced Modiv Social, a product that lets shoppers aggregate coupons from any source and lets them share select mobile coupons via Facebook. The shopper will see a “share” option on a coupon to identify that it can be shared via Facebook.

Once shared, people can grab the coupon and load it to their mobile coupon wallet.

A New Mobile Coupon Network

YOOSE, the hyper-local mobile ad network, and adsmobi, have announced plans to launch a new service called ‘Prime Location’. It will be a location-based service for mobile coupon campaigns.

Walgreens Relaunches Circular

Walgreens has relaunched its advertising circular, a Sunday staple read by more than 50 million U.S. consumers each week, with a digital offering that offers hundreds of additional items through Walgreens.com and its mobile applications. Online ads also allow for social sharing via Twitter and Facebook, the ability to create advanced shopping lists and more.

We have read a variety of prognostications for all matter of big trends for 2012. At PRI, we do not pretend to know and see all, but we have spotted several noteworthy developments that have been building for a while and represent significant business opportunities.

2012 holds many promises in terms of retail innovation. Smart phones, mobile POS, experimental devices, and digital signs quickly come to mind. As retailers leverage these technologies into their stores, the challenge of presenting a uniform, cross-channel message experience becomes exceedingly complex. Add to this equation all of the data that retailers collect and achieving an integrated in-store marketing approach presents both a challenge and an opportunity.

Several themes we see presenting themselves to address this in 2012 are: • Business Analytics.• Marketing Metrics.

Business analytics enable a retailer to understand and predict customer behavior. Data mining results in segmentation and analysis, against which multi-channel campaigns are executed and measured. Although not frequently linked with analytics and metrics, we are also of the view that content must be a part of the equation.

We use the term Digital Marketing Systems to describe the end-to-end platform that embodies:

Behavioral merchandising embodies business analytics that result in understanding, predicting, and influencing consumer purchase behavior instore by messages delivered via a digital communication network. The objective of behavioral merchandising is to stimulate the consumer buying process by mass customization of targeted messages. At its core, behavioral merchandising advocates that by providing consumers with meaningful store, product, and service information, customer trust and loyalty can be increased.

Automated content management refers to content that is created based upon directions received from business analytics. It encompasses the systems and processes to create, manage, optimize and distribute content on a cost effective, timely basis in response to instructional sets received from the www.plattretailinstitute.org behavioral merchandising process. Automated content management drives down production costs, dramatically reduces production time, and greatly expands the ability to “mass customize” high quality digital messages systemwide.

Return on promotion is an advanced set of digital message performance metrics. Traffic, conversion rates, and results (POS data or inventory movement, for example), are monitored in response to in-store promotions. ROP provides the promoting firm with feedback on the impact of its displayed content. This information enables the brand to determine its return on investment, and continue to fine tune its content strategy. The network operation, in response to this feedback, will be in the position to instantly adjust pricing relative to demand. As well, this information is shared with the business analytics, so that the messaging intelligence is constantly improved upon.

In 2012, automated solutions that deliver the intelligence, content, and metrics to produce successful integrated in-store marketing campaigns will be a big business.

Platt Retail Institute (PRI) is recognized worldwide as an industry-leading expert in research and consulting to retailers, media companies, financial institutions, hardware, software, transmission, and other business enterprises seeking to impact the customer in-store experience. PRI serves as a knowledge bridge between the academic world and industry, by synergizing the wealth of knowledge being produced at the university level with the need for more advanced yet practical business research and insight at the customer level. In addition to its global consulting expertise, PRI also publishes pioneering industry research.

Feb 18, 2012

Cincinnati, Ohio-based identity designerAdam Laddasked his 5-year-old daughter her impressions on some popular logos — my favorite is her response to the Republican Party logo. This is both adorable and some of the best and most authentic field research out there. - via Brand New

Feb 14, 2012

Social media is arguably overhyped as a marketing trend: it gets well under 10% of marketing budgets (different surveys have figures from 3% to 8%) and results are questionable (it was rated the least effective content marketing tactic in arecent MarketingProfs study). But social is clearly growing fast and has great potential. So marketing automation vendors are understandably eager to support it in their systems.

I recently took a quick tour of vendor sites to see what social features they’re offering. Results are summarized in the table below. I need to stress that I’ve only credited vendors for features they list on their site. I strongly suspect that the data is incomplete, especially for basic features that are so common the vendors simply don’t bother to mention them. (Note: the table has been updated after the original post based on vendor feedback, so it's a bit more reliable than it was originally.)

The features fell into four broad categories:

• Basic posting and sharing: the most common features and the simplest level of social media marketing. As I wrote above, most vendors probably have most of them even though the chart doesn’t show them.

• Social media monitoring: watching social media for mentions of the company or other topics and responding when appropriate. Plenty of third party applications can do this, so providing it within the marketing automation system is mostly a matter of convenience.

• Importing social data: loading social data into the marketing automation database so it can be used for segmentation, analysis, and sharing with salespeople via CRM integration. This is harder than monitoring since it requires linking social identities to marketing leads and connecting to the social system’s API.

• Social platform integration: using native features of the social platforms by writing to their APIs. This can be tricky for the marketing automation vendors to build but it lets their clients take greater advantage of social media possibilities.

Looking at the chart as a whole, what stands out is the sheer variety: once you get past the basics, no features are common enough to consider them standard. This contrasts sharply with mature categories like email, landing pages, and nurture campaigns, where dozens of features are shared by most systems. The reason is obvious – social media is still very young – but the disparity still provides interesting insights into what different vendors feel are most important to their clients.

The variety also illustrates that a great number of social media applications are possible (with plenty more to come). Naturally, the vendors will borrow features from each other, so we can expect some convergence over time.. A standard set of features will emerge as the industry figures out what’s really important.

The list below presents each vendor with a brief explanation of the table entries. Links on the vendor names go directly to the vendor Web page or press release that described their social media capabilities. In cases where the data came from different sources, I've put the link on the items themselves.

Neolane- posting: central panel to post tweets and Facebook updates- sharing: place sharing buttons on emails- tracking: measure clicks on links in system-generated posts.- Facebook forms: use forms within Facebook pages and apps to gather customer permissions- social sign-in: use social media sign-in services to replace marketing automation forms- personalized Facebook ads: display different ad versions on a Facebook page based on the user’s profile, including both Facebook and non-Facebook data

Marketo- sharing: place sharing buttons on landing pages- tracking: measure visitors from the shared pages- load Twitter feed: connector to load Twitter conversations to lead profiles and use the conversations in campaign rules

Eloqua- sharing: place sharing buttons on emails and other marketing materials- social sign-in: use social media sign-in services to replace marketing automation forms- Klout segmentation: add Klout scores to lead profiles and use them in campaign rules- show Twitter feed: let salespeople see a lead’s Twitter posts on their Profiler dashboard

IBM/Unica- social monitoring: use CoreMetrics Social to find social media mentions of company

Aprimo - posting: manage blog posts with review process and SEO recommendations- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and microsites- tracking: integrate with third party web analytics to track social referrals- monitoring: integrate with third party social listening tools for monitoring

Pardot- posting: central panel to schedule and send social messages- load social profile: use Qwerly to import social media profiles and add to marketing automation lead profile- show social profile: show social profile data in CRM

Loopfuse- social monitoring: use Collecta realtime search to find social media mentions of company

HubSpot- posting: send social media messages and blog posts- sharing: place sharing buttons on blog posts and other content- social monitoring: find social media mentions of company and respond- Facebook forms: build ‘welcome’ app to capture leads on Facebook page

Feb 13, 2012

Classification: Creativity: 3,5; Will to buy: 3,5; Empathy for the Brand: 3,7

Total: 3,6

Amnesty International Sweden added an outdoor element to its Slide to Unlock iPad campaign to promote text message activism, in an event marking the 10th anniversary of Guantanamo Bay's opening.

In November, it erected a digital billboard in Stureplan (the 'Times Square' of Sweden) to symbolise the difference thta signatures can make. The billboard reacted simultaneously whenever someone added their 'signature' on their iPad, with the name of the person appearing automatically on the big screen and the prisoner depicted appearing to be 'unlocked'. Amnesty collected 150,000 signatures which it delivered to President Obama ahead of his State of the Union address. The campaign is by Garbergs, authors of the original Slide to Unlock campaign, and digital production studio Yours.

Feb 10, 2012

Social media analytics and tracking can be very time-consuming and expensive. You’ll find quite a few smart social media monitoring tools, but what if you can’t afford them?

That’s why many social media marketers and power users are in constant search of free, efficient alternatives. Here, we’ll share a few ready-made spreadsheets you can copy (navigate File + Make a copy) and use for social media analytics. They are free, highly customizable and extremely easy to use.

Most of the scripts that run the spreadsheets are “public,” meaning you can access them from the Tools + Script Gallery menu (this also means they were reviewed and approved by Google Spreadsheets team).

1. Fetch Twitter Search Results

GetTweets is a simple and fast Google Spreadsheet script that lets you quickly export Twitter search results into a spreadsheet. You can play with the spreadsheets in two ways.

Increase the number of results returned — up to 1,500. I managed to fetch about 1,300.

Twitter search operators can help you filter out links (search “-filter:links“) and find tweeted questions (search “?“). Check out this article on advanced social media search as well as this list for more search terms.

3. Compare Facebook Pages

Like the previous spreadsheet, FacebookFans is a Google macro based on Facebook API. For any Facebook page ID, it fetches the number of fans. It also visualizes the data with a pretty pie chart. Track your as well as your competitors’ Pages using the script, and the numbers will update each time you open the spreadsheet — easy!

4. Monitor Social Media Reputation

This spreadsheet not only generates Google search results for the term you provide, but also fetches Twitter and Facebook counts for each page returned. Anyone can easily run a search for his or her brand name and see how actively it’s being discussed in social media.

Try using a few search Google operators, for example:

["brand name" -intitle:"brand name"] to find in-text brand mentions you are most likely to have missed.

[inurl:"guest * post" search term] to find recent guest blogging opportunities on the topic of your interest. Note: if you are getting a “too many connections” error, try another search to refresh the scripts. Or re-save the scripts from Tools + Script Manager.

5. Extract and Archive Your Followers

This spreadsheet is the hardest to set up, but also has the most complex functionality. It lets you extract your friends and followers to easily search and filter your Twitter contacts.

The script requires your own Twitter API key (which is pretty easy to get), and provides easy-to-follow set up instructions. Try running the scripts a couple of times to get them working. Go to Tools + Script Manager and run Test script.

If you have done everything correctly, a Twitter Auth will pop up. Then, you’ll be able to authenticate your own application. After, go to Twitter + Get Followers and you should see the tool importing your following list. However, if you have large following, you likely won’t be able to import it all (for me, that meant about 5,000 recent followers).